Why return the count at all?

If the caller wants the count it can get it directly from the returned array.

#useful caller code goes here

my(@arr,$count);
@arr=myfunction();
$count=@arr;

#more caller here
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An array evaluated in a scalar context such as assigning to a scalar gives the number of elements in the array.

Update: seems that this is bad for some reason. The question could have been (or probably will be read by) new perl users and so knowing that you need not return the count of an array to access it is valuable? The original node said nothing about the array being multidimensional.